I’ll give you one more vertical, and then stop. You can figure out the rest yourselves. Travel is a great vertical for Facebook, and in fact, creating contextual services like Group Travel could be very cool. According to the latest data published by eMarketer, online travel sales zoomed to over $78.8 billion in 2006 in
National Association of Realtors (NAR), whose over 1 million members are Realtors, is a century-old powerful trade association of real estate agents and brokers in US. Besides owning the word ‘Realtor’ as a registered trademark, the NAR has sufficient clout among the decision makers, which stems from its being the US’ third largest donor to
The WSJ reports that eBay has quietly opened its classifieds site, Kijiji (what a lousy name!) to the US audience, positioned to compete against the wildly popular Craigslist, in which it owns a 25% stake. One wonders why eBay doesn’t just buy Craigslist; the answer to that question is that Craigslist’s founder, Craig Newmark, has
I wrote about Citrix being an acquisition target for Oracle recently on the grounds of their on-demand collaboration product suite. Since then, I did a bit of digging on the numbers for the Citrix Online business. Whereas Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) is primarily an enterprise software company with: * $1.134B revenue 2006 * 60 million users
As more and more media moves to a digital format, the role of digital advertising firms will continue to increase. Firms which have hybrid experience, who truly understand brand management and are able to capitalize on online efficiency (buy more ad space for fewer dollars) are going to excel. AKQA will be an interesting firm
Here we get a bit philosophical about the reason behind some of the industry regulation problems, and the pressures applied from the major players. Nonethelss, here is a new trend in advertising, one that is based on algorithms and mathematics, and the older schmoozing oriented models will be forced to adapt. SM: So you think
With the recent trend of private equity deals and acquisitions of advertising firms, the industry is truly on fire. This is the perfect opportunity for Tom to either take his company public or sell for a substantial amount. SM: Have you had offers already for an acquisition? TB: No. SM: In the future, in terms
AKQA had taken funding from Francisco Partners originally, and is now generating $100M in revenue annually. Francisco recently exited the business, and sold their shares to General Atlantic Partners. This happens right at the time when the online advertising market is heating up in a big way. SM: Your new investor is General Atlantic Partners?